The free rides brought an extra 20,000 to 30,000 patrons to the already-taxed system during each Spare the Air Day, an increase of 8 to 10 percent over normal.

There were packed cars, blaring boom boxes, food and drink containers (which are banned) being tossed everywhere -- even reports of homeless people flocking in to beat the heat.

BART police reported that the additional complaints mostly involved teenagers fighting with each other, intimidating passengers and generally behaving badly.

The truth of the matter is that this 80% white Hip Hop fan myth has long been a nice marketing tool used by media corporations to justify ad revenues for Top 40 radio stations. Here's a little background on this.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, many rap artists complained how the urban (Black) radio stations did not play rap except on the weekends and even then it was only in the mix late at night. Chuck D highlighted this concern in his song 'Don't Believe the Hype'. He goes into further detail about this lack of support by Black urban programmers in a song called 'How to Kill a Radio Consultant'.

According to Black radio programmers they avoided playing rap, because it was affecting their advertising. In spite of Hip Hop's cross over success with groups like Run DMC and the 'positive, vibe that existed within rap at that time-(it was the Golden Era), many companies associated Hip Hop with violence done by Black people. Hence a Black radio station playing Hip Hop was likely to have difficult time getting money...

The scholar Tricia Rose, whose groundbreaking book Black Noise was the first great intellectual work on hip-hop, has opined that at this point in its history, hip-hop culture has completely adopted the logic of late capitalism. But it's important to note that, even in hip-hop's first breakthrough product, the 1979 multiplatinum-selling single by the Sugar Hill Gang called "Rapper's Delight", there were lyrics like this:

Hear me talkin' bout checkbooks, credit cards, more money than a sucker could ever spend
But I wouldn't give a sucker or a bum from the Rucker not a dime 'til I made it again

In fact, part of the lore around these very lyrics is that they were stolen from one of the most popular rappers of the time — Grandmaster Caz — by his self-proclaimed manager, "Big Bank" Hank, to use in the song, another story in this culture of stories that only seems to boost the "capitalism-is-theft" school of thought.

Early plans call for the museum to occupy one or two floors of a multi-purpose center being built by the nonprofit Northeast Bronx Redevelopment Corporation. The group is hoping to combine several floors of low- to moderate-income housing with a gymnasium, a small theater, a recording studio, and the museum.

The project is planned for the site of an abandoned transfer station that the group acquired from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority this spring. The corporation has also received more than $1 million in state funding to clean up the site, which Mr. Seabrook said could take up to two years.